RIAA Missing The Point About Record Store Day

from the play-it-again dept

The RIAA's blog is an endless source of fun, and its latest post is touting some figures showing the success of the recent "Record Store Day". Record Store Day is a yearly event started by a group of indie record stores that's grown over the last couple of years, and is marked with some festivities as well as the release of a lot of limited-edition records, CDs and other products available only in hard copy in certain participating shops. This year, there were 175 such products, and they helped boost the sales of indie shops. In particular, sales of vinyl albums were up 119 percent over the previous week, and vinyl single sales grew by 529 percent. But this isn't proof that the "we must sell music" mantra is correct; the sales increased not because people were buying music, they increased because they were buying an attractive, scarce physical product, like special vinyl picture discs or limited-edition prints. Record Store Day is a great example of how the packaging of a product that happens to contain music can drive people to buy it. The value consumers were paying for was in that packaging, not necessarily the content within it. Whether they know it or not, the stores and bands have given customers a reason to buy.

The real proof is whether or not the majority of people buying these limited edition products won't actually listen to the music on them. Are they being bought as collectors items? or are they being bought to actually listen to?

I do know that a lot of people are actually listening to vinyl music again, but I'm also sure there are a lot of collectors out there too.

Mostly resellers

My wife and I share a vinyl buying habit, so record store day has been quite a treat for us to watch expand over the last three years.

I've got a few local indies that participate, and talking to the cashier during our 15 minute checkout process (like I said we've got a habit) he asked us if we were buying to resell. Apparently the majority of the vinyl walks out the doors in the hands of people who only show up once a year and have the items up on e-bay as soon as they are home.

I'm not quite sure what it says when the majority of purchases are done by arbiters who are distributing the product to people not lucky enough to live close to participating stores, but it's probably an indicator that RSD is a good "reason to buy" even for those who can't buy direct from stores.